But with “Jingle Bells,” I was starting to actually enjoy myself and feel that I was an active part of the choral community, when the music stopped unexpectedly and the lyrics came to a sudden screech, trailing off like water buffalo running off a cliff. The whole party got quiet. And when I looked up to see what had happened, I saw Martha, and Martha was staring at me.
I felt my face turn flame red.
“Laurie,” Martha said in front of everybody, “are you mouthing the words?”
If anyone didn’t know who I was before, they sure did now: I was now the Word Mouther. Song Ruiner. The “Jingle Bells” Liar. Everyone’s eyes bore down on me. The white-wine new friend next to me took a step aside and cast shame in my direction.
“Listen,” I wanted to say. “I didn’t ask to sing. I didn’t want to sing. You made that decision for me! You marched through this party and picked people at random, like a Broadway version of Dr. Mengele. ‘You sing!’ ‘You sing!’ ‘You just watch!’ I’m just trying to appease a hostess and not harm my fellow neighbors. There’s something that comes out of these pipes, all right, but it’s not the gentle tweet of a songbird. It is the sound of gears grinding the flesh and bone of inner ears.”
But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I stood there, caught in the silent spotlight, with even my husband watching, and said, “Yes.”
“Oh, no,” Martha responded immediately. “This is a party, and we all need to sing.”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized.
“Jerry,” Martha said, as she pointed to an older man in a Fair Isle sweater and motioned for him to take my spot, “I need someone here who can deliver.”
“Laurie,” she added, looking back toward me as Jerry plucked the lyrics sheet out of my hand, and I halfway expected her to send me to the party principal’s office to wait there until they all decided how to deal with me.
“Come next to me,” she said, carefully thinking, then handed me a tinkly object she’d grabbed from the top of the piano. “You can be on bells.”
I smiled as if I had always wanted to be on bells, as if I had been eyeing the bells from the minute I walked through the front door and finally they were mine, or as if I would have jumped on the chance if I could have majored in bells in college.
Satisfied that I was now within striking distance, Martha smiled politely, counted to three, and jumped into the intro again. I smiled as I watched all the singers do what I couldn’t and waited for Martha’s signal for my foray into the song. She gave me one firm nod on the chorus, and I jingled my little heart out. Jin! Gle! Bells! Jin! Gle! Bells! Jin! Gle! All! The! Way! Oh! What! Fun! It! Is! To! Ride! In! A! One! Horse! O! Pen! Sleigh! EY!
It was like the whole party took a collective breath when they saw I was going to shake the bell for real and not just move my head and murmur, “Ching ching ching.”
A! Day! Or! Two! A! Go! I! Thought! I’d! Take! A! Ride! …
I felt like I was a contribution to the gaiety of the evening, to the holiday atmosphere, and was being a worthwhile party guest. I was chiming along, lending so much festivity to the party, when the music stopped abruptly again, this time only long enough for Martha to hold up her right hand and sharply inform me, “Only on the chorus, dear,” before she led her troupe back into the second verse, which I had apparently been busy mutilating.
There are four verses to “Jingle Bells,” in case you didn’t know, and when sticklers sing the song in its entirety—which they tend to do when they’ve written out every single lyric on a sheet and copied it off on party paper—it can last longer than Avatar.
When we finally finished the song, Martha smiled again, took the bells from my hand, and thanked me. My husband had my coat already waiting for me at the front door, and my bell hand begged for my wrist splint during the short walk across the street. We never mentioned to each other, although we both knew that the next time we moved to a new neighborhood we were going to have to work up a routine or obtain a circus skill before accepting any invitations.
A year later, my husband and I were bundled up on a Tuesday night and were going out to get a bite to eat when I noticed something strange. There were cars parked everywhere, up and down the street, in front of our house, almost blocking our driveway. I had never seen that many cars on our street before. And that wasn’t all.
It was like a scene from a movie. People were streaming from every direction, also bundled up in hats and scarves, carrying pans, trays, and sometimes gifts, and all were converging on Martha’s house. If I didn’t know better, I’d say a team of horses pulling a sleigh had parked at Martha’s curb, delivering several ladies who’d been nestled under tartan wool blankets.
From my porch, I could see through her living-room window: The house was already packed. The perfect Christmas tree had been resurrected, and a fire blazed on the hearth. People were milling about inside, and I’m sure they were chewing on ham.
I looked at my husband at the same time that he looked at me. I opened my mouth to say something, but I was too stunned to make anything come out.
“Don’t even tell me you’re surprised,” he said to me after he locked our front door and stood in front of it.
“I can’t believe she banned us,” I whispered.
“WELL, I CAN,” my husband mouthed.
And it was true. We had been blackballed from the neighborhood holiday party, that was it. No second chances, no replays. One episode of lip-synching and we were sunk. No pleas or explanations of why I was faking it would ever be heard. I had apparently insulted my host by not participating in the fullest holiday sense, and I was not going to get a reprise.
I really tried hard not to take it personally, and I suppose that it stung that much harder because I liked Martha and her husband, I thought they were nice people, and my feelings were kind of hurt. Yes, I am a jackass who tried to lie my way through a Christmas carol. Yes, I am the neighbor who spazzed out on the shaking of bells and evidently took it too far. Yes, I am the one who would completely mouth the words again if given the chance, because if my hostess thought that was bad, she should have heard the damage I could have done with my lungs activated and at full blast. People have reacted more calmly to air raid sirens than they have to my singing voice. And here we were. New on our street, already outcasts. I hoped that it was a misunderstanding and maybe this party wasn’t the same sort of party as the holiday party last year; maybe this was a party that we wouldn’t fit in with, much like the parties we had had full of graduate students. Maybe this was a party strictly for the senior center, I tricked myself into thinking. And then, in the window, I saw a different neighbor chatting with another guest, a neighbor that wasn’t a member of the senior center or anything like that. The neighbor was just a neighbor. And I had to admit that we weren’t invited because I was just me.
I had failed the audition for “fun neighbor.”
We didn’t get invited the next year, either, or the year after that, but by then, whenever I saw a stream of jolly, happy holiday people descending on Martha’s house, the sting wasn’t quite so sharp. I had learned to expect it.
And then one day in December last year, Martha rang our doorbell.
My husband answered it, and she asked if he might be free to help move a heavy table for her. He said sure, and when he came back, he mentioned that after he had helped move the table down a flight of stairs, Martha looked at the space in the living room where the table had been and exclaimed, “This year, we’ll have room for dancing!”
I looked at my husband intently.
“Really?” I asked. “She said that?”
He nodded his head.
“What do you think that means?” I prodded further.
“Well,” he began, “I think it means there’s going to be some high kicks over there some night soon.”
“Did she say anything about an invitation?” I queried.
“No,” he replied. “But I have a lot to do today. I didn’t stand around and make small ta
lk.”
“Maybe she’ll put the invitation in the mail, like last time,” I wondered aloud.
“We weren’t invited last time,” my husband reminded me.
“I mean the time we were invited,” I said, a little irritated.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Well, who would ask someone over to move heavy pieces of furniture to make a dance floor and then not invite them to the party?” I asked. “No one would do that. I think we’re back in. We have to be back in. Right? Don’t you think? Wouldn’t you feel bad if you didn’t invite someone who helped you? I would. I felt bad when the UPS lady delivered the turkey and I didn’t invite her over for Thanksgiving. We’re back in. We have to be back in!”
My husband just shrugged. “I moved a table down some stairs,” he replied. “I didn’t go to Israel and initiate peace talks.”
That following Thursday, there was indeed dancing at Martha’s house. People were breaking out moves you typically only see at weddings with an open bar. It was a good thing she moved the table; she really did need the room. I had to stop a couple of times because I was laughing so hard I could hardly breathe, especially when my husband went for broke and delivered a David Lee Roth high kick that missed a lamp by millimeters.
To be honest, I hadn’t had that much fun in a long time. We danced a little, ate some snacks, and I single-handedly brought “Jingle Bells” back, at the top of my lungs, for all to hear.
I sang it loud and proud, until it annoyed my little dog so much that she jumped up and attempted to push me down, while my husband used the fake sleigh bells from this year’s storm-wreckage wreath and accented Ev! Ery! Sin! Gle! Syl! La! Ble! In the chorus AND the verses.
Far away and across the street, I doubt anybody at Martha’s had such a good time.
Chill Out, Grass Lady
To tell the truth, I had walked up into the house through the front door and had gone back to the car three times in the course of the day before I noticed something was wrong. When it finally hit me that things were not as they should be in front of my house, I stopped dead in my tracks and gasped dramatically, “You have GOT to be shitting me!”
Frankly, I don’t know what other reaction you could possibly have once you realize two trees have been stolen from your yard.
The two trees, on either side of my porch in enormous pots, were gone. Simply gone. As in not there. The enormous pots were still there, but the trees themselves—two beautiful azaleas with fuchsia-colored flowers that had just exploded into bloom—were no longer planted in them.
I stood there and stared at the porch, speechless, looking for the trees. Because as anyone who’s had anything stolen from them will tell you, the first reaction you will have when you discover your thing is gone is that you will look for it. As in, “Certainly my eyes deceive me. Humanity cannot be so depraved that someone would thieve up to my front porch in the dead of night and steal two trees from my yard. I have overlooked them taking a break from being potted trees and they are in lawn chairs sunning themselves on the north side of the yard, because I’m sure it’s frustrating to be a tree and never be able to go anywhere, suffering from Restless Trunk Syndrome.”
And no matter how many times you’ve been stolen from, the reaction is always the same: disbelief. Complete and overwhelming shock to the point that if you go out to the street and your car has been stolen, if there is a fire hydrant within the general vicinity, you will look behind it. Because you cannot believe it. Getting robbed, it seems, never gets old.
As it turns out, this isn’t the first time that I’ve had live goods plucked from within inches of my front door. I’m actually a veteran of plant crime. On Mother’s Day a few years ago, some asshole waddled up to his mother’s house with a ceramic pot full of pincushion flowers and Miracle-Gro potting soil that I had purchased from Home Depot merely eighteen hours before. It hadn’t even cleared my bank account yet when D. B. Cooper jumped off my front steps holding my planter, scurried to his getaway car—which, remarkably, wasn’t registered to me—and showed the jackal who bore him that although he couldn’t be bothered to stop in at Walgreens to get a friggin’ card and a stuffed animal, a son’s love is always worth making a rap sheet a couple of lines longer.
That morning, I even looked behind the folding chair I also had on the porch for the twenty-pound pot of flowers, just in case I had misplaced it.
But you know what? There’s no misplacing trees. I mean, you can gasp and shake your head all you want, but you’ll never find your tree under a paper towel on the coffee table or behind a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t like they were hiding in the mailbox or stuffed behind a solar light.
When I finally recovered enough to speak, I yelled to my husband to come outside quickly, and when he did and I explained what had happened, the first thing he did was look for them, too.
“The trees?” he said, his eyes darting from corner to corner. “They took the trees? Are you sure? How does someone steal trees? They were as big as you. They were as tall as you are!”
And then, since I’d had extensive and thorough detective training because Law & Order was Nana’s favorite show, I began to search for clues. Yet, oddly enough, there weren’t any.
“This is creepy,” I said to my husband, pointing to the facts of the case. There was no soil spillage. The area around the pots was completely clean. It was as if the trees were surgically removed, as if someone used a laser.
“It’s like a cattle mutilation,” I dared to whisper, a little bit in awe. Frankly, I can’t pull a tomato plant out of a four-inch pot without spraying dirt in a five-foot radius like a soil-filled jack-in-the-box, so I could only come to the conclusion that whoever helped themselves to my trees had some sort of extraordinary method of extraction.
“This was planned,” my husband said, who had a couple of Law & Order marathons under his belt, as well. “This wasn’t a random shrubbery theft. This was a deliberate hit.”
“You know, I’m inclined to think that,” I said, almost laughing. “But in this town that would mean we were insinuating that a couple of hippies got together and coordinated something more complex than who was bringing the pot and who was bringing the bong.”
“Believe me, I know how impossible it sounds,” my husband agreed. “But this was planned. There’s no way someone drove by here at three in the morning after the bars closed, noticed that we had some particularly lovely trees, and happened to have a shovel and tarps. I’ve never known a drunk to choose digging over a three-for-a-dollar taco run. No, this was brazen. I highly doubt these were the first trees they’ve abducted. Now it’s your turn to say something snappy, Len.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Why would drunks steal trees when three blocks away there are still two street signs left on High Street?”
“I guess we’ll never know what kind of person steals trees,” he said simply, clapped his hands together once as if the case had been solved, and went inside.
But I had an idea.
The tree theftery wasn’t the first such ridiculously bizarre event to happen in my front yard, and this wasn’t even the same front yard where my potted flowers had been stolen. Several months earlier, my sister was due to pull into the driveway with her son and my brother-in-law for a visit, when my little dog, Maeby, went nuts over something she spotted while standing guard at the screen door. My sister had never been to my new house before, and I knew that whatever went down during their vacation—good, bad, and downright ugly—was going to be in the full debriefing report she would supply to my mother upon her return home. After which there would be a phone call from my mother, who was still quite upset that I had moved beyond running distance from her, and who would delight in telling me that her suspicions about my new abode were absolutely confirmed, relaying that “Your sister said there were weeds in the cracks in your sidewalk, you still haven’t learned to vacuum, and your dog isn’t as smart as you said she
is.”
Thinking my sister had arrived early, I went to the door and took a peek outside but saw nothing and chalked it up to a taunting squirrel. Five minutes later, Maeby went nuts again, and this time I walked out into the front yard for a more thorough investigation. It didn’t take more than three steps to see what was causing the commotion.
There, in my fertilized, mowed green grass, was a heap right under the biggest tree in the yard. A heap of human. It was wearing a hoodie, baggy pants belted basically at the knees, and a backward baseball hat. Initially I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but I marched right over to the tree and hoped that I would figure it out once I got closer.
The heap, it turned out, was a guy, lying on his back, his skinny legs bent up, and his arms splayed wide across the grass. He had not been there five minutes prior when Mae alerted me to the presence of an intruder, but he was there now, sprawled out in my yard with less than ten minutes to the touchdown of my sister. He was a young guy, teens, maybe early twenties, but no older than that, I decided, as I looked at his bony, angular, and paler-than-any-pale-should-really-be complexion. But I stopped wondering about the drained color of his skin once I saw an ant crawl across his eyelid.
And then another ant. And another ant.
Now, to say that a swarm of ants was marching across his face may be a bit too suggestive, but I have to emphasize that “swarm” is a relative term when creatures have more than two legs and they appear in multiples. To me, that’s a battalion, and to make matters worse, when they’re invading a landscape that happens to be a face, there’s usually only one reason for that: The face is on a corpse.
My stomach flipped and a curtain of horror dropped on me.
“… and your sister tells me that when she drove up to your house, there was a dead person in your yard!” I could hear my mother dig. “Who has a dead person in their yard? No normal person has a dead person in their yard! There is not one single person in my neighborhood who ever had their sister visit when there was a dead person in their yard! EVER. Why do you have dead people in your yard? Do you think it’s funny to have dead people in your yard? Well, let me tell you, your sister was very upset! And it’s not funny!”